Suppose a high school student is deeply interested in a particular social or political issue and interested in doing something about the subject. What advice would you give him/her?
You may assume that the high school student is roughly similar in profile to the typical active LessWrong participant when he/she was in high school.
Some candidate social and political issues are listed below.
Topics of particular interest to the LessWrong audience:
- Effective altruism
- Existential risk, in particular unfriendly AI
- Epistemic rationality
Others that are more commonly perceived as important issues in the world today:
- World peace
- Global warming
- Education policy
- Effectively combating crime
- Civil liberties violations
- Migration policy
I asked a few people to opine on the last two issues on the list (in Facebook posts linked above) and the respondents generally focused on the acquisition of background knowledge rather than direct activism (i.e., read and learn rather than proselytize). Prima facie, this seems like sound advice. But it's quite possible that the set of people I interact with on Facebook is biased in favor of armchair stuff to the exclusion of activism. What do people here think?
Feel free to pick on one particular item in one of the above lists, or something not on either of the lists, and provide a specific answer for that. Or, provide general guidelines. Also feel free to specify additional assumptions (such as the country the student is in, or the student's other abilities or interests) and answer within the constraints of those assumptions.
PS: For some of the issues, you may feel that the issue is overrated or misguided (for instance, you may think that global warming is a non-issue, or that the status quo is optimal with respect to civil liberties or migration policy). In this case, your advice to the hypothetical high school student might largely be directed at making him/her come around to your point of view of the irrelevance of the issue. Comments suggesting you'd give advice of that sort are also welcome. If you'd simply suggest to the high school student to refrain from thinking about socially or politically charged topics entirely, that would also be interesting to know (cf. politics is the mindkiller).
There seem to be plenty of cases where some seems to think it's a perfectly sensible use of their time to be an activist in favour of law X, and other people think it's a perfectly sensible use of their time to be an activist against law X. Same goes for politician Y or party Z. And people also seem inclined to donate money for/against law X / politician Y/party Z.
(In your lists, Effective Altruism, World Peace and Global Warming don't fall under this pattern, but immigration, crime and maybe educational policy do)
Two possible explanation:
There's also the combination, where hapless irrational activists are suckered into spending energy in support of something that is just some kind of power play by a group they're not really part of.
Anyway, "read and learn" seems better both for figuring out which issues are worthy of support, and for figuring out how to better support those issues.
This ignores quite a few other possible explanations. The most obvious to me is that people have different values.